“Where do we go next?” I asked Alex.
“Right to the left, into the WC,” he whispered back. It was an inspired decision. No one had yet opted for spending the night standing over the train’s toilet. I tugged my trembling, panicked mother into the tiny, reeking space. And as Alex struggled through all the cars in a futile search for a more comfortable site, Mother and I remained there until the following morning, leaning against its walls, occasionally nodding off for a few seconds, forced to watch hundreds of passengers of both genders relieve themselves.
Thus it was that we finally reached Lisbon. By the last days of December, we had boarded our ship. It was a pleasure yacht called the Carvalho Araujo, which had never gone farther than the Azores and was making its maiden voyage to New York. My mother and I had been assigned a cabin on the lower deck; Alex was to share a cabin on the top deck with a noted French flutist, René Le Roy, whose charm and culture had immediately led Mother and Alex to befriend him. In a matter of hours, it was decided that the four of us would share all meals together. The tiny ship lurched terribly on the storm-tossed winter seas, and within two days some reshuffling of bunks had taken place. My mother and Le Roy were very prone to seasickness, whereas Alex and I remained perfect sailors in the roughest seas. So to accommodate my mother, it was decided that she would share the more comfortable upper-deck cabin with Le Roy, while Alex came down to share the lower cabin with me. I felt my mother was perfectly safe with Le Roy—brought up in her world, I may have vaguely known the meaning of “homosexual” before I fully knew the meaning of “mistress” or “lover”—and the accommodation struck me as perfect. At night, when it was time to go to bed, Alex would put a pillow over his eyes and say, “You can get undressed, I’m not looking,” which made me feel very grown-up. My new life with Alex and Mother seemed to consist of a series of equally unconventional arrangements that I found charming.
Tatiana, Alex and Francine sailing to the United States in 1941. Francine wears the camel’s hair coat bought by Alex before the departure.
I remember our passage on the Carvalho Araujo, which took a whopping two weeks, in a blaze of gold and of music. Before dinner, René Le Roy often uplifted the storm-tossed passengers’ morale by playing the flute parts of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. His performances were held in the dining room, where vitrines were filled with delicate lace-patterned gold jewelry of Portuguese provenance, encrusted with fake diamonds, which transfixed me. My lust for them was fulfilled when my mother, who could not make up her mind which of three brooches in the vitrine she preferred, received all three of them from Alex as a New Year’s present. I could then admire them, fondle them at will.
My bonds with Alex deepened yet further during our ocean crossing. Beyond her distaste for the ship’s British cooking, my mother was too sea-sick to eat, and for one meal out of two she stayed in her cabin, drinking broth. Le Roy often started the meal with Alex and me, turned pale, and left to join Mother in their double-bunked room. Most days, Alex and I remained alone at our table, feasting on three large meals and feeling very superior. Throughout the icy January rains and terrible swells, when half of the passengers were absent from the dining room, we remained at our table, devouring all the bland delicacies that were meant to be good for Alex’s ulcer diet: cream soups, chicken and mashed potatoes, custards and trifles. It was during those weeks spent lurching toward the United States that I learned my first words of English from Alex, which explains why my adopted language, for the next few years, was tainted with his British public-school accent. “Hoow duuu you duuu, chaaaaarmed to meet you,” I repeated after him during our solitary, gorging dinners.
For decades to come, these highlights of our exodus to the United States formed a strong conspiratorial bond between Alex and me—the bond of intensely shared memory. “Do you remember that incredible train ride between Madrid and Lisbon?” we’d still ask each other thirty, forty years after our arrival in the promised land. “And how we went out to purchase that camel coat when Mamasha’s mink coat was stolen….” “And RenéLe Roy playing his flute in the dining room of the Carvalho Araujo….”
PART TWO
The New World
“To live is such an art, to feel is such a career.”
—HENRY JAMES,The Tragic Muse
Alexei Evgenevich Iacovleff, Francine’s grandfather, in his Cadets uniform, St. Petersburg, ca. 1900.
TWELVE
Rochester, New York
In a photograph I’ve had since early childhood, my maternal grandfather, Alexei Evgenevich Iacovleff, is shown in his mother’s St. Petersburg apartment at the age of nineteen, indolently reclining in an ornately tasseled damask chair. He is dressed in the uniform of the Imperial Cadets. A very long cigarette holder is poised in one hand, a white kid glove held limply in the other; a fashionable pince-nez perches on his nose; his boots, polished to bronze gleam, stretch nonchalantly over a Turkish carpet. The mirrored wall behind him reflects the quantity of rich stuffs—brocade, moire, ormolu, ebony, cut glass—that fill his mother’s turn-of-the-century drawing room. The photograph well conjures up his life as a privileged young playboy of St. Petersburg society: the smell of rare Turkish tobacco, gambling rooms in early-morning hours, women, women, cards, and dice, the hedonism of a gentry beginning its fall into doom.
There seems to have been a restless, nomadic streak among the Iacovleff men. Although he was trained, after his cadet days, as an architect and engineer, my grandfather’s early life was marked with quite as much adventure and recklessness as that of his younger brother, Sasha. He married a beautiful, ambitious, coquettish woman, my grandmother, who liked nothing more than to surround herself with ardent admirers and play them off against one another. Assigned by the imperial government to design opera houses in different regions of Russia, he changed habitations every three or four years, a swift turnover in those days when a home was lived in by the same family for generations. The dashing Alexei Evgenevich was one of the first persons in his country to own a car and to pilot a glider plane of his own, a commodity that he seems to have handled in a somewhat slapdash manner. But my grandfather’s love of risk was above all reflected in his passion for gambling. How often, whether working in St. Petersburg, in Vologda, in Penza, had he won the equivalent of a month’s pay in seven minutes and, carried away by the greedy hope that he could double that sum, lost all that he’d just gained. How often, after losing several months’ worth of salary, had he staked his last fifty-ruble note in an attempt to recoup the losses and wasted it all again. How often, staggering out of a casino after a rich night, had Alexei Evgenevich given half of his new banknotes away to whatever beggars he met between the casino and his lodgings and sunk the rest, the following week, into another eccentric venture—such as financing the first glider flight between Moscow and St. Petersburg. And how many times, finding himself in a new city with one ruble in his pocket, not knowing whether he’d have anything to eat that day, had he staked that last coin and made some two thousand rubles in the following hour, suddenly able to order champagne in the best restaurants and acquaint himself with some actresses.
Alexei Evgenevich’s wife—my grandmother—remonstrated, threatened, deplored. These Iacovleffs! she fulminated, what a group of derelicts! The Aistovs never carried on like that, she might add, holding up as an example her own father, the admirable company director of the Marinsky Imperial Ballet, who’d worked at one institution, lived in one house, for his entire life and had never so much as touched a pair of dice. Succumbing to her pleas after some particularly ill-advised folly, Grandfather Iacovleff had occasionally imposed periods of abstinence on his gaming; but during those moments he seldom ceased hearing the treasured sounds of his addiction—the clink of scattered money on the baccarat, blackjack, roulette table, the croupier’s siren voice crying out “trente trois et un, rouge, impair, manque!” Might one count the times this rake had resolved to give up his vice forever as soon as he won back what he’d just lost, yet reneg
ed on his promise? Swung through the chaotic emotional cycles involved in games of chance—apprehension, elation, dread—the gambler’s psyche does not crave respite from such frenzied sequences but strives for still more chaos, still more cyclones of the spirit. And even as Alexei Evgenevich became the head of a family, he could not seem to conquer his passion for that fatal seductress he later referred to, in his American years, as Lady Luck.
Much has been written about gambling, less about the particularly reckless habits of Russian gamblers. To label my grandfather’s actions “decadent” or “irrational” would reveal a total ignorance of Russians’ curious attitude toward money—an attitude that to some degree pervaded every member of my Russian family. For in the view of the Russian intelligentsia and nobility, amassing capital—that skill considered so virtuous in the “civilized” West—was a rather vulgar activity, which should be engaged in only by the merchant classes. As Dostoevsky (himself an addict of the gaming table) put it, better than anyone else, the Russian is reckless with his money because he has an all-too-Christian compulsion against the very principle of accumulating it. “Not only is the Russian incapable of amassing capital,” he writes in his classic novella The Gambler, “but he dissipates it in a reckless and unseemly way, and looks at that art of dissipation as a worthy, even a noble trait. Hence his propensity for gambling.” Musing on the recklessness of Russians’ spending, he adds: “Is there a notion more repellent than to subordinate the eternal soul of a human being created in God’s image to the accumulation of capital, as the Germans are so skillful at doing?” In sum: Any Russian being chastised about squandering his money too quickly might well answer “Blast the money! The quicker the better!”
According to the Iacovleff family’s official line, the reason for my grandfather’s sudden departure from Russia in 1915 is that he had patented a revolutionary new automobile tire, which necessitated a kind of rubber not found in Russia. That tale always struck me as inane. I suspect, rather, that he had run up huge debts, too often reneged on his promise to give up gambling, and solved his dilemma by abandoning his family and taking flight. All we know is that in 1915 he traveled directly east, via Siberia, to China, with the intention of migrating, eventually, to the United States. Freed from all family censures, able once more to frolic at will with Lady Luck, he gave full rein to his addiction. For two or three years, the elegant vagabond lived in Shanghai, where a large community of Russian exiles had begun to gather—he had so radically cut all ties to his family that he did not even know his favorite sibling, Sasha, was in the Far East in precisely those same years. Being fluent in French and German, when he had lost at the casino he supported himself for weeks or months at a time by serving as a tutor to the children of more fortunate exiles or interpreting for visiting dignitaries. After a winning streak, he would buy an expensive horse and, accompanied by a guide, ramble through the Gobi Desert for a few months until his money ran out, enjoying “the beauties of nature”—always his favorite pastime when he was not at the gaming table.
Thus did Alexei Evgenevich Iacovleff, a very tall, slender man with an aquiline face of unusual beauty, squander his life until an October midnight in 1917. As he stood in front of a Shanghai casino after having once more gambled his last cent away, he heard news of the Russian Revolution and was filled with the rueful awareness that he might never be able to go home again. He leaned against the wall of the casino, lit up a cigarette, and continued standing there, the probable loss of Russia heavy in his heart. And right there on the steps of the casino…I’ll tell the incident in his own words, as he shared it with me several decades later:
It was the first winter of the Revolution. I knew that if something extraordinary did not happen I’d take up that pistol they’d trained me to use so well in cadets’ school, and…I needn’t say. A Russian of my acquaintance came up to me—he was as desperate as I, we’d had a bit to drink, we stood around commiserating about our losses. Suddenly, an elegant carriage drives up to the casino. A woman leans her head out of the window—she’s very beautiful, heavily veiled. “You look frozen, come into my carriage,” she says in slightly accented French. We get in, she drives us to her flat, she gives us still more champagne and brandy, we spend a curious night with her. In the morning, as we’re about to leave her flat, she asks us what we want most in the world. Our answer is that we want to go to the United States. She orders her coachman to drive us back to our respective lodgings, and before we leave her she hands us both an envelope…. They each contained the equivalent of several thousand dollars! We left for America a few weeks later.
So he arrived in San Francisco in 1918, a single man with still no interest whatever in life beyond gambling and the occasional exploration of “the beauties of nature.” A large Russian community had also gathered in California, and Alexei Evgenevich continued his hapless habits of yore: In his unlucky weeks at the gaming table, he took various short-term jobs as tutor or translator or even as garage mechanic; in his luckier ones, he roved about California, savoring its Sierras, its northern lakes, its southern deserts. So it went for a few years, until 1922, when, after a particularly heavy loss at the baccarat table, he walked into a San Francisco department store in hopes of finding employment, for a change, as a salesman. It is there that fate was again most kind to him, introducing him to a winsome young Russian woman named Zinaida. A tiny, slender creature ten years his junior, she had come in to buy a blouse and, having detected a Russian accent in his speech, addressed him as he stood in line at the employment office. (“Women always did this,” he said decades later with a weary sigh. “They found me handsome, they grabbed at me.”) Zina had fled her homeland with her widowed mother in the very first weeks of the revolution; here she was in San Francisco, a registered nurse at the local hospital, with enough earnings saved to soon move into a house of her own. Alexei Evgenevich was taken with his compatriot’s sweetness and charm. And “Zinochka,” as she was later called in our family, was determined to get her man. She soon offered Alexei her hard-won savings on the condition that he give up gambling and return to his original vocation: engineering.
For some reason—perhaps the vagabond had finally wearied—he accepted. A week or so before they married, Zina suggested that to make life easier, he might change his name to some more pronounceable Yankee form. This, too, he readily agreed to do. Thus it was that Alexei Evgenevich Iacovleff became Alexis (“Al”) Jackson and began to live the plain proletarian life invoked by his new name. With Zina’s mother in tow, the Jacksons moved to Rochester, New York, where, Zina had learned, there were openings at the local Kodak plant. Grandfather landed a minor engineering job on the production line where the cameras were assembled, the same job at which he was still working decades later—never once having asked for a promotion or even a raise—when the time came to retire. For most ambition, desire, and life force seemed to have been drained out of him when he stopped his long tryst with Lady Luck. She had been his one true love, and upon being forced to give her up he became a sedate, inert, perhaps a broken man.
A reformed gambler can be a tragic sight: He will not give evidence of the physical deterioration caused by alcohol or drugs; he will remain, to all appearances, intact. Yet look at his eyes: Whatever ardor, curiosity, strength of will they once expressed may well be gone. They will often have that listlessness, and above all that deep solitude, which characterized my grandfather’s gaze. That very aura of derring-do that had made him so thrilling and seductive to women was suddenly drained out of him. From the time he married his Zinochka and settled down to a risk-free Yankee life, Al Jackson had no goal whatever but to make ends meet. Once his addiction was wrenched from him, he had no yearning for accomplishment, a better car, a larger income, no ambition for anything beyond the security of sitting evening after evening, year after year, by his coal grate, reading Popular Mechanics or listening for hours on end to his beloved radio.
For nine years after their father’s departure from Russia, my mothe
r and her sister, Ludmila, did not receive any news from him whatever, did not learn about any of these turns in his fate. It was only in 1924 that Babushka finally caught up with her vagrant American son. In a stern letter from Paris, where she had lived since 1922 after her emigration from Russia, she reminded him that he had abandoned a family back home: You left two daughters in Russia who love you, miss you; do something about them! As soon as my grandfather answered her missive, Babushka, very proud of her detective work, immediately reported to her granddaughters in Penza.
“My Dear and Most Beloved Grand-Daughters, your father has been found!” So begins Babushka’s letter to Tatiana and Ludmilla, dated August 1924. “A Russian priest helped us to find each other. Papa writes that he very often sent letters, both to you and to me, but never received an answer.”
(In time-honored Russian tradition, the derelict male is being called to order by a powerful, dominating female who thrusts him out of his indolence; how many such women have I seen throughout Russia, remonstrating and bullying their sons and husbands as they chase them out of bars and gambling dens and the smug refuge of their sofas.)
“He’s so happy that we’ve found each other at last,” Babushka’s letter continues. “He had no idea that Aunt Sandra and I were living abroad. He’s had a very difficult time because he was only allowed to take 500 rubles out of Russia, and he’s had to get along all this time without any steady material support. He now feels very concerned that you have a steady source of funds. Soon I’m sure that we can all manage to go and see him.”
(Par for the course, the Russian gambler, upon being forced to confront his trespasses and his years of neglect, is swamped by a tide of self-reproach, offers eternal love and his last pennies to the poor children he’s left behind, and asks them to share whatever humble home is his.)
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